MobME’s partners and clientele include major Indian Telecom Operators like Vodafone, Airtel, Aircel, Idea, Tata Indicom, BSNL and MTNL, Media Companies like NDTV, Network 18, Dainik Bhaskar, Mid-day, and Mathrubhumi, as well as Enterprises like Kolkata Knight Riders, Kingfisher, A1 Team India and Café Coffee Day.  MobME also works closely with closely with the State Governments of Kerala, Goa, Nagaland and Central Government departments like the Department of Science and Technology (Govt. of India).

MobME effectively uses Open Source technologies to build scalable platforms, allowing the company to provide technology solutions of very high quality standards at extremely competitive prices. MobME’s line of work can primarily be classified into three – Mobile Value Added Services, Core Network Solutions, and Enterprise Solutions.

From India’s first peer to peer Mobile Content Sharing platform (Mobshare) to the Nation’s Largest GPRS based subscription service (Picture Posts), MobME is a uniquely positioned player in the Mobile Value Added Services industry. With a slew of new products in the making and expansion of services to more Telecom Operators, MobME continues to fuel its exponential growth in the domain.

MobME is one of the key players in the Core Network Solutions space with live Telecom systems across the length & breadth of the country. The company serves several leading Telecom Operators with a wide range of Innovative Platforms on SMS, Voice and USSD. These platforms have been revolutionary in terms of effectiveness, flexibility as well as pricing models and have continued to stand the test of time. The Company’s flagship product ZULO (Zero-User-Latch-On Alerts), is the first of its kind in India and has helped clients sustain & grow revenues in-spite of the tough competition they face in the cluttered Indian telecom-space.

The Enterprise Solutions Division offers a range of Information and Communication Technology Solutions to Brands, Businesses, Banks and Government Institutions with an extensive set of hosted solutions to fulfill their communication needs over SMS, Voice, Data & other Mobile Technologies.

One of the major focus-areas of the company is Mobile Governance, popularly known as M-Governance. MobME works very closely with Central and State Government Departments, Nodal Agencies, Telecom Network Operators & Regulatory Bodies for empowering the citizens of the country. M-Governance is part of a broader phenomenon of mobile-enabled development, taking electronic services and making them available using devices such as mobile phones. M-Governance has the potential to help make public information and governance services available “anytime, anywhere” to citizens and officials and provides the much needed last-mile-connectivity for e-Governance systems in developing countries like India.

MobME is a pioneer in Mobile Governance initiatives in India. The Company was awarded the first comprehensive M-Governance project in the country by the State Government of Kerala. As the execution agency, MobME has also been vested with the responsibility of formulating the M-Governance strategy for the state. A comprehensive and integrated Service Delivery Platform using Voice, Signaling and Data has been created to roll out the various services. Following the success of the ongoing M-Governance Project in Kerala, MobME has also been awarded M-Governance projects in several other states like Goa and Nagaland.

MobME thrives on Innovation. In 2006, MobME was among the finalists at the Lockheed Martin India Innovates Program and was rated as one of India’s 100 Innovative Startups by Nasscom. In 2007, MobME became the youngest team to be featured in the list of Nasscom 100 IT Innovators, a list which included Companies like Texas Instruments, HP and Infosys. MobME was also featured in the Wall Street Journal list of “10 Startups to watch for in India” and voted by Nasscom as India’s Most Innovative Startup in 2008. In 2009, MobME was featured by Nasscom as one of the “50 Emerging IT Companies in India”. Former President of India, Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam is among the strong supporters of this young and enterprising company and had personally invited the founders to the Rashtrapathi Bhavan during his tenure.

One of the key highlights on how MobME is able to influence the society at large is that after being the first Technology Business Incubated Company at Technopark, the state-Government owned IT-park in Kerala, the company is now partnering with Department of Science and Technology (DST), Government of India to setup the first PPP (Public Private Partnership) Model Technology Business Incubator in India. This incubator would focus on the Telecom-sector. This creates a unique model of sustainable entrepreneurship and the mandate is to incubate the next 100 campus-startup companies over a period of five years.

The vision of the founders is to herald the dawn of a silicon coast in India. With a country that is growing at an amazing pace and an economy expected to become one among the top three globally, MobME aims to be the front runner of the classic Silicon Valley story of ‘Campus to Corporate’ and IPOs. The company is growing at over 200% annually and is in the process of raising further investment for a proposed IPO between 2013-2014.

This company profile was written by Aaron Goerge, candidate for a MPhil in Technology Policy at Judge Business School, University of Cambridge

The cost of drug discovery has ballooned to $1.3 billion ^[1]. The number of approvals of new drugs has significantly reduced. Nearly 43% of drug candidates fail due to efficacy problems, 33% due to safety concerns, and 11% due to pharmacokinetic issues during development ^[2]. Further, approved and marketed drugs are being withdrawn due to concerns regarding long-term safety, with 94% of such withdrawals due to toxicity ^[2].

Regulatory agencies are also seeking longer clinical studies in larger populations due to increased safety concerns. This has escalated the cost of drug discovery, driving the focus of Research & Development (R&D) primarily on “billion dollar” indications. Recovery of drug discovery investments today is only from highly priced and insurance reimbursed regulated markets such as USA, EU and Japan, which contribute as much as 80% of the market value ^[3]. Rest of the world (ROW) with 85% of the population represents only 20% of the market. This market bias defeats equitable and inclusive drug discovery. Indications like Malaria, Dengue and Tuberculosis are neglected. A disruptive innovation is required to change the existing drug discovery paradigm for addressing this inequity.

The current discovery model is primarily responsible for this high cost, time and risk of drug development. The target-based, in-vitro driven approach is unable to predict the activity of a drug candidate in living beings at an early stage of development. Several million dollars are spent on preclinical development before wet pharmacology studies are undertaken. Tens of thousands of molecules undergo logarithmic attrition during prospective stages of development. Essentially, the current model does not provide risk-mitigated justification for the huge R&D investments. According to Dr. Bowman, “Less than 1% of developing drugs result in success, but the pursuit of many promising “failed” drugs can cost a company millions of dollars in R&D” ^[4].

Indus Biotech’s unique discovery paradigm creates ways to mitigate late stage failure of drugs due to safety and efficacy reasons, while reducing the net cost of discovery. Indus Biotech uses a disease-based model, prospecting for molecules from food chain raw materials, with established safety and physiological activity and used for human consumption over millennia. This unique approach mitigates the uncertainty of a future safety failure at an early stage of development.

Indus Biotech’s disease-based discovery model starts with in-vivo screening (wet pharmacology) of molecules for assessing the safety and efficacy in living beings. Researchers across the world have started realizing the importance of an in-vivo driven discovery model ^[4].  Early in-vivo screening helps in assessing the multiple target activity of the drug molecule as well as knowledge on potential side effects. This approach has also proven that development cost can be reduced without compromising the science of drug discovery.

Another advantage of Indus Biotech’s model is the possibility of early proof-of-concept studies to understand human safety and efficacy response, thus establishing confidence in the potential of a drug molecule before incurring the high cost of regulated clinical trials. Since the molecules are derived from food chain raw materials and not chemically synthesized, preclinical safety profile and efficacy results create convincing evidence to conduct a human proof-of-concept study in accordance with the ethical and legal requirements of drug development.

Last but not least, the United States Food and Drug Administration has established new guidelines for Botanical drugs that allow Indus Biotech to work on drug substances with assured therapeutic consistency. This regulation offers significant cost reduction in drug manufacture by permitting poly-molecular assays with benign impurity profile, which is generally the case when starting from food chain raw material. In contrast, the synthesis of a New Chemical Entity (NCE) requires sophisticated and costly manufacturing process steps for limiting toxic impurities to significantly low levels.

The widespread use of botanical drugs will have other collateral benefits, such as a positive impact on the global issue of climate change. The additional cultivation of food chain raw materials for drug use will increase and sustain green cover, thus reducing carbon foot-prints and providing an opportunity to improve and sustain an agrarian economy.  For a country like India with 60% of its population engaged in agriculture, the greater use of botanical drugs provides higher earning potential for marginal farmers. This obviates the need for migration to urban centres for employment, thereby reducing the burden on already overpopulated, polluted and resource limited cities.

Indus Biotech’s innovation redefines the future of drug discovery by dramatically reducing the drug development cost and time to market. By making the choice of a disease and using food chain raw materials as a starting point of drug discovery, this model mitigates the burden of uncertainties in drug development, while capturing the essentials of science, safety and efficacy of the current NCE paradigm.

In conclusion, by reducing risk, time and cost to market, Indus Biotech’s discovery model addresses the need for investments in R&D of neglected diseases. It also offers opportunity for pharmaceutical industry to expand into untapped ROW markets, which today exhibits growth rates as high as 14-15% per annum ^[3].  For the first time, pharmaceutical companies can look beyond blockbuster indications with exciting growth opportunity.

References:

[1] DiMasi et al. (2007), Managerial and Decision Economics, vol. 28 (4-5), pp. 469-79.

[2] Schuster et al. (2005), Current Pharmaceutical Design, vol. 11, pp. 3545-3559.

[3] World Pharmaceutical Frontiers, March 2009, pp. 18-21.

[4] Bowman et al. (2010), ACS Chemical Biology, vol. 5 (2), pp. 159-161.

 http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/05/in_india_looking_for_a_sustain.html

L-R: Dr. Satya Dash, Mr. Pradeep Kashyap, Mr. Benjamin Mathew, Mr. Sanjay Gupta, Mr. Saroj Mohanta and Mr. Kirti Mishra

Mr. Pradeep Kashyap needs no introduction. He is considered to be the father of rural marketing in India and has been a pioneer in designing and implementing innovative business models in the social development sector, especially in the Bottom of the Pyramid (BoP) with several exceptional projects since the late 1980s. He combines a rich experience in the corporate world with more than two decades of experience in the social sector. One of the best known projects that established linkages between social development and rural marketing was Project Shakti*, that was designed, piloted and implemented for Hindustan Lever Limited by Mr. Kashyap and his team at MART*. Project Shakti has gained recognition as a leading example of participatory growth across the world. In mid February 2010, I had an opportunity to meet and discuss with Mr. Kashyap and MART’s partners Mr. Kirti Mishra, Mr. Saroj Mohanta, Mr. Benjamin Mathew and Mr. Sanjay Gupta about MART’s innovative projects and dynamics of changes in rural India. Here are a few excerpts from a two hour interview in which Mr. Kashyap spoke about MART and changes in rural India amongst other things.

Q. How was MART founded?

Pradeep Kashyap: I left the corporate sector after 20 years in 1987 and my idea was never to start an organisation. I didn’t start an organisation until 1995 when we named ourselves as MART. However MART as a partnership was established in 2003. Before then we had a loose kind of arrangement where everybody was working together.

My idea was to apply the knowledge I had. I recognised that the strength I had was in the marketing area and this was completely missing in the social and development sector. Nobody believed that you needed marketing in the social sector. When you are working with the NGOs who are helping villagers produce handicrafts, incense sticks or even soaps, they are competing with the corporate sector and they do need professional marketing to be able to compete with the corporate.

Q. What are MART’s focus, motivations and philosophies?

Pradeep Kashyap: Our focus is the BoP emerging markets. The philosophy we follow is social heart and business mind. There are three different kinds of organisations- NGO, corporation and the government. NGOs bring a social heart and a social mind and that is the reason why they are not good at strategies of scale up. They do great work in small geographies but their work continues to remain localised. The Corporate sector which wants to enter the BoP markets brings a business mind and unfortunately sometimes a harsh business heart. Their whole orientation is mostly being concerned about numbers and sales. The government brings a business heart and social mind which is wrong. We realised that we need a different kind of organisation which has a very strong business mind but has a lot of compassion for the poor- a social heart. Because, unless you empathise with the poor, you won’t be able to find the solutions that are best for them.

Since I came from the corporate sector and started in the working the social sector, I could see a potential for bridges and synergies between these two sectors. The critical role MART plays is to make corporate understand the community language and the community to understand the corporate participation as well as the government. We offer end to end solutions from research to strategy and capacity building in the emerging markets.

Our philosophy is also teamwork in truest sense of team work, and building a totally flexible, non-hierarchical organisation. We are not just giving lip service to this. All our projects are team based. So it’s not uncommon for a junior most person to lead a project in MART if that person has that capability which is required for that project. That gives a huge moral boost to young people. They get the opportunity to lead a project. Our logo is handshake between two people with bowed heads. We believe that you can acquire knowledge if you are humble. We are constantly building partnerships with experts.

In 1989 I was appointed as marketing advisor to the Ministry of Rural Development (MRD) Government of India. That opened my eyes to a larger vision and a macro picture of this country. I had an umbrella view. That I think was very crucial which has helped to develop this vision because one could see it from top and that also gave me excellent networks with NGOs.

Q. What other projects did you do during those early years after you left the corporate world?

Pradeep Kashyap:  With MRD I started a concept of sales exhibition called Gram Shree Melas (exhibition) where artisans could bring their products directly to these exhibitions which are held in the cities. The advantage to the rural artisans is that there were no middlemen; they get the full value for their products. They get to interact with buyers whom they would otherwise never be able to see and hence not understand their taste. We also used to conduct training programs during melas. We would bring some designers, packaging experts, research experts and marketing experts who would talk about positioning and various other things to the rural artisans. I ran this program for three years in which 70-80 such Gram Shree Melas were run. The program continued after I left and 300 of such exhibitions all across India in 75 cities from 1989 till 2000 were run by CAPART- the government’s nodal autonomous body for NGOs.

Then in 1993 I bid for and got a World Bank project called Women’s Enterprise Management Training Outreach Program (WEMTOP) for which the requirement was six people and therefore I had to set up a team. It was working with poor women who were artisans etc and teaching them business skills, how to cost their products, break even analysis. It was very innovative training. This was all done through visuals, lots of games and role plays.  After WEMTOP, we disbanded and then in 1995 we started MART. Later in 2000 we started project Shakti which was until 2005, that was the first big visibility project we did. That put us on the national and the international map.

Q. You have been mapping rural India for 2 decades. What in your opinion have been significant changes in rural India?

Pradeep Kashyap: There have been a few significant changes. The first is the microfinance (MF)  movement- today there are 7-8 million women’s groups serving about 70-80 million rural families out of 160 million families which means half of rural families are linked to a MF Institution or Self Help Group. What this has done has empowered women now that they have control over money. That has been the first major shift or change where the power equation has changed, as earlier a wife depended on her husband for any expenditure whereas now she has her own money and own savings, so she can use that for family health and education. Besides managing money they are also interacting with their peers and many of them are members of the federations, they go for meetings at the district HQ, district collectors and because of such exposure, the rural women have gained confidence.

The second major change has been the Panchayati Raj (local governance system in villages) where the women got 30% reservations in Panchayats (the rural governing assemblies). That has created women leaders empowered in politics which is transforming rural India.

The third one is road connectivity. In the first fifty years since independence we only connected 40% of villages by roads in next ten years we connected another 30%. The pace of road connectivity has been very fast over the last ten years. Today except for very tiny villages almost most villages are connected by roads and once you get connected by road, it means that you then come into the mainstream economy. The produce can then reach the mandis (local markets) or other benefits such as if you wish to establish a school in the village then you can transport all kinds of materials that you need to build the school to the village. Road connectivity really transforms the village economically.

The fourth is that the overall awareness about education has gone up in the villages. Today if you talk to any rural women her priority number one is to educate her children. Before, they didn’t know that education could be such a differentiator.

The fifth change has been media penetration in rural India. There are more TV sets in rural India than in urban India in terms of sheer number. TV is seen like a family durable as it is seen to benefit everybody. TV gives them contact with the world.

The next big change has been technology, especially mobile connections. There are already 100 million connections in rural India out of 160 million families. By 2012 there will be more than 200 million mobile connections in rural India that means more than one connection per family. The mobile platform is now becoming universal for all kinds of information exchange whether it is Reuters Market Light or mandi prices or even monitoring health through tele-medicine. So information is becoming real time, therefore solutions have been much more impactful. So what is happening is that, what brick and mortar infrastructure couldn’t achieve because it wasn’t possible to go round to 600,000 villages, technology has suddenly made the world flat, as Friedman says.

Q. What are your thoughts on entrepreneurship and education in rural marketing?

Pradeep Kashyap: Government can’t be creating too many salaried jobs. 93% of our workforce is in informal sector.  We have immense numbers of young people and therefore the challenge is to how to create jobs through self employment and entrepreneurship. The government has recognised that.

We have initiated innovative models such as 3M and Inclusive Marketing. 3M is basically for large scale employment in rural areas. The first M stands for microfinance. To start any business you must have some money or access to capital. The second M stands for market because you’ll only be able to make profits if you are able to sell your products and there is demand for it for which you must have a market for it. And what we say that in the rural context the ‘hat’ (local village market) is the first access for poor people because they cannot jump straight from village to market in Kolkata, therefore the first access  they have is to the hat market. The third M is ‘Microplanning’ where you look at the kinds of raw materials available in that area, what are the kinds of skills people possess, because it would be best to start those activities for which people already have skills.

I have been championing entrepreneurship courses for the business school and I taught courses in XIM- Bhubaneswar in 1993 called ‘Start your own business’. XIMB was the second institution after IIMA which had this course. Now most of the B- schools have entrepreneurship courses. My whole premise was that MBA and business institutions produce job seekers but what we need are job creators. If they (MBA students) have been equipped with all this knowledge then they should take the risk and have the courage to start something on their own and provide employment. So that is what is needed.

Before, rural marketing was not taught in many business schools. I wrote the rural marketing book five years back and now we conduct courses on rural marketing in B-schools. In the meantime, rural markets also started expanding, corporates also started focussing on rural markets and hiring people with rural marketing background and management school saw a demand from companies and started to meet market demands.

Q. How do you see MART growing in future?

At MART we have been focussing on innovation. By and large we don’t like to do projects of same kinds and like to innovate with new kinds of projects. Learning is a continuous process and you never stop learning. Over the last 10 years we have enough data and enough experience about rural India. We have created a number of learning platforms such seminars on rural marketing, rural distribution, rural telecom, rural insurance. We are very clear that we will be in the emerging markets and we think whether it is the neighbouring countries like Bangladesh or countries like Brazil we will have a demand there. We are expanding our geography and we are also expanding our sectors. Earlier we were in marketing and livelihood, now we are in healthcare, agribusiness, insurance, banking and telecom. These are the opportunities that we see for ourselves.

Interview & compilation by,

Dr. Satya Prakash Dash

Centre for India & Global Business,

Cambridge Judge Business School

University of Cambridge

*Project Shakti <http://www.unilever.com/sustainability/casestudies/economic-development/creating-rural-entrepreneurs.aspx>

MART India <http://www.martrural.com/>

The world economy is undergoing dramatic and fundamental changes. The centre of geopolitical and economic gravity is irreversibly shifting from West to East, the pace of technological change is accelerating, even as the world grapples with growing scarcity of resources. To thrive in this turbulent world, corporations as well as nations need ‘creative leaders’, a new breed of visionary and empathetic leaders who act less as commanders and more as coaches, less as managers and more as facilitators. In his engaging talk, Dr Kalam overviewed the dramatic socio-economic and technological shifts occurring worldwide, and outlined the key attributes of creative leadership that are critical for driving innovation and growth in the global knowledge economy. He discussed the importance of education in cultivating creative leaders in vast numbers in both developed and developed nations, and addressed the catalytic role of the youth in providing creative leadership in emerging economies like India.

Harish mentioned that SELCO’s core mission is to disprove three myths associated with sustainable technologies and the poor:

1. The poor cannot afford sustainable technologies
2. The poor cannot maintain sustainable technologies
3. Social ventures cannot be run as commercial entities

Over the last decade, SELCO has sold more than 100K highly customised solar lighting systems in rural Karnataka and Gujarat – and SELCO guarantees timely after-sales services, in spite of the terrain or distance between SELCO and the end-user. Harish and his team have the ambition of increasing this number to 200K households over the next two years as well as to diversify their portfolio of products to include other energy products and services such as cook-stoves and biomass energy.

Far beyond being just a sustainable energy company, SELCO uses an innovative ‘entrepreneur-model’ that starts with systematically identifying the needs of rural customers. SELCO then assists local entrepreneurs to serve these needs as well as to source financing from micro-finance agencies. The entrepreneur in turn provides customised service to end-users, including doorstep financing. For example, to address the lighting needs of street vendors, SELCO created entrepreneurs who maintain centralised solar charging stations and deliver solar charged batteries directly to street hawkers at a negotiated price that is collected on a daily basis.

What elements of the ‘entrepreneur model’ can be taken to the USA and other western nations?

Posted by Dr. Satya P Dash, Program Manager/Research Associate
Centre for India & Global Business

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